Is Canada OK with torture? Vic Toews sure is

Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews speaks during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday. (SEAN KILPATRICK / CP)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is apparently a big hockey fan, even said to be writing a book about it. So it seems appropriate, surely for the first time ever in Canadian journalism, to employ a hockey image in describing current politics.

If the federal cabinet is a hockey team, Vic Toews is the guy who can’t skate or handle the puck, but stays on the team because the guys all like him. He always backs the team, whether it be right or wrong. Guys like Toews make the other players look smart.

On the ice, skill-challenged players often make up for their lack of dexterity by playing the bully boy. That’s the perfect job for Toews, the minister of public safety who says it’s OK to torture. So he’s the enforcer. Or goon, depending on your point of view.

Under Toews, orders went out in 2010 to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to accept information about potential attacks on Canadians or Canadian property even if CSIS wasn’t sure how the information was obtained. This would only apply to "exceptional circumstances," although there’s nothing public that specifies what that means.

Now, Toews isn’t saying it’s OK to torture in Canada. That would be illegal. And Canadians would be disgusted if their government employed thugs and molesters in pursuance of its goals, even in these troubled times that supposedly scare us all so much.

Toews insists that his government "does not condone torture and certainly does not engage in torture." That’s good, because the law says it’s not OK for Canadians to torture anyone in Canada or anywhere else.

But Toews says it’s fine to use information gathered from foreign sources that do use torture. He said as much in the orders to CSIS. Then defending the orders in characteristically morbid fashion last week, Toews suggested torture could prevent mass murder, like a bomb in the Air Canada Centre. He thinks Canadians expect their government to use whatever means necessary to prevent attacks.

No doubt some Canadians are perfectly fine with the idea of obtaining information from torture chambers around the world. After all, decent folks are never tortured without good cause, right? Except for that Maher Arar guy, but hey, mistakes happen.

Toews’ fan club claims to represent the majority views of Canadians when they cheer along with the minister’s tough talk. They’re not going to mollycoddle terrorists and it is just fine for Canada to use whatever means necessary to keep the scary world away. But there’s a problem.

Back in 1987, under a majority Conservative government, Canada ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In that document, Canada forswears the use of information obtained by torture and promises to prosecute the torturers. It doesn’t make exceptions for terrorists or spies. Torture is banned, period.

Maybe we don’t care about that anymore? If not, perhaps Canada should refute the torture convention. Then we can join the esteemed ranks of countries like Iran, Zimbabwe and Angola which remain stubbornly outside the realm of civilized state behaviour. At least they don’t pretend otherwise.

But Canada wants to have it both ways. It claims to be a haven for human rights, but it ignores those rights at will.

"Torture is never justified because it fundamentally violates the very notion of human dignity and integrity," wrote Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada in the National Post. Freedom from torture "is at the heart of what it is to have human rights in the first place."

So, the problem isn’t that the government is willing to use torture to prevent someone blowing up a hockey arena. It’s that if torture is OK in some circumstances, why wouldn’t it be in others? Why is it all right to torture some foreign bomb plotter and not OK to torture a bank robber or a pimp or a whistle blower in the civil service? Where do you draw the line?

In announcing a new anti-terrorism strategy last week, Toews said Canada will take all "reasonable measures" to fight it. Given his comments on torture, maybe we should wonder what "reasonable" really means.

Comments(34)

Canada isn't the police force of the world so who cares where the outside info comes from? If info comes this way, it must be acted upon. The people like Mahar that return to the troubled Middle East after obtaining Canadian citizenship are authors of their own misfortune. I think that instead of physical torture, some sort of truth syrum should be developed that would get the bad guys to reveal their info.

The point of the article is that you have to unjustly torture and kill an awful lot of innocent people before you "justly" torture even one bad one. Furthermore, you have to torture a heck of a lot of bad guys before you torture even one of the people you really need to torture to even vaguely justify using torture as an unreliable tool of information gathering.

Torture doesn't work.

Now if you're justifying using torture because it makes you feel better about being afraid all the time because you don't trust the ability of your government to deal with vague "threats" to your ability to get that special type of ice cream you like to have on your weekend outings to the cottage, then by all means disrupt hundreds and thousands of innocent lives being lived in poverty and misery under repressive regimes underpinned by fear based tactics like torture for torture's sake alone.

Or ...

You could use that education and figure out a way to get your money and that of the rest of us who know that development means peace, to these people in the form of life changing micro-loans (below the radar of the aid-stealing wealthy 1% of their country).

But to do that you must stop your government from contributing to the repressive regimes abroad that create the desperation locally that makes terrorism seem like a viable option to wreak vengeance on you for your surrogate acts of torture and life decimating evil against them.

What TV shows are you watching? I think Jack Bower used to have access to some of that didn't he?

I am sure very few who have a BComm and MBA would agree with your rather Saddam like way of dealing with those you don't like.

Doesn't matter to you Arar was INNOCENT I see! His own fault for travelling there you say! Guess the same could be said for any Canadian travelling to the troubled Middle East for any reason right!!!! No exceptions. Guess we should shut up and mind our own business when those good old Iranians stone some woman for being raped right?

I suppose in the world you live in, the recent Canadian victims of violence and such in Mexico are the author's of their own misfortune because of where they travelled! And Hey, Canada is not the world's police force right?

You support and condone torture and use of info obtained by such! You also condone and support the unlawful and forced injection of drugs into people, against their will, and without legal approval. All this to see if a theory or accusation might be true!

You're not very Canadian, pro human rights, or normal thinking! Are you ever Americanized!

No doubt a lot of Canadians, not "some Canadians" support Toews. Thank..God or whomever you are not head of anything you such are weakling, what they could get away with if you were running the show. You bet your bottom dollar I don't give a rat's behind about a terrorist's "dignity". This is a dig at the Conservatives and nothing more. You know darned well the difficulty Toews would have trying to verify that every last piece of information was unsullied. Oh you forgot something Mr Toews, I think the pencil that was used to write the note was onced used by an ex afghan cop, might have tortured someone. Absolute nonsense

It's nice to see Dan the freelancer is just as overwrought as Dan the news director.

Note in the final paragraphs how he switches from discussing information OBTAINED by torture to a discussion of torture more generally. Despite what Dan is suggesting, it's pretty clear the government is not endorsing torture, and we are not on a slippery slope that ends with waterboarding for unpaid parking tickets.

A better analogy is this one. Gang bosses blatantly ignore the UN Convention, and decide to inflict some "correction" on one of their own. In the process, the victim reveals information about the many criminal activities in which the gang has participated. This is secretly recorded by the police, and is only overheard later. What to do? The information exists. It was obtained by torture. The police had no culpability. Do we clutch our chests and say "never will such foul things besmirch our ears?" No. It's used legally to prosecute people and save lives.

This is the same thing. No one disputes that torture shouldn't occur. Yet it does. To close our eyes and ears to that information is not only irresponsible, it is morally bankrupt. I don't think I could live knowing that I ignored intelligence that could have prevented the Oklahoma City or 7/7 bombings ONLY because it was obtained through torture. Dan apparently could.

So let's say a group of Islamists has patiently and quietly, over time, assembled a billion ton hydrogen bomb in downtown Toronto which has been checked and double checked and is just waiting for someone to push the button. But before that happens, a member of Saudi intelligence calls a guy he knows over at CSIS and tells him they’re interrogating some guy who just told him about the bomb plot in Toronto. What do we do? Do we ignore the information and let Toronto go up in a massive mushroom cloud because that information had been obtained using torture? Or we do act on the information and shut down the bomb. Be interesting to know what we’d do there.

it's Toronto. LOL. But seriously, if we received information about a plot in Canada that was obtained through torture and ignored it because we don't approve of torture, and we therefore disgarded it, what would people say when the plot went off and people were killed and maimed? I can hear the hue and cry now. The government (ie Harper) refused to protect us and didn't act on the information.

We need to use every piece of information we can get to keep the country safe. In exceptional circumstances, I'm OK with the government treating people roughly if time is short.

Let's blow up a couple of the bleeding hearts' canards:

"Torture is evil."
Well, on it's own it's evil, but it might serve a greater good. Suppose we had water-boarded Al-Qaeda operatives before September 11 instead of after? Furthermore, waterboarding causes no longstanding physiological effects. Five minutes after it's over, the body is back to normal.

"Torture doesn't work".
Really? If it doesn't work, why have so many well-educated, intelligent people used it since the dawn of time, and still use it today? People under duress will say anything, sure: sometimes they'll even tell the truth and tell you what you need to know to save lives.

I thought after last week's piece we would no longer see Dan Leger's opinions in this paper. Nope. Too bad.

.....I wouldn't wait for torture and stuff....it would be quite an accomplishment to move a hydrogen bomb to downtown Toronto...this is a job for Batman not Vic Toews.......and then what of the Klingons...what about them...and the Deceptocons...how do we handle them!!!???

On one hand CSIS would be crazy to ignore intelligence that could save lives, even if that intelligence was obtained through torture by a foreign agency.

On the other hand we become just as bad as "them" when we condone torture for the gathering of that intelligence. They ruin themselves through hate and killing while we ruin ourselves when we allow "torture for the greater good".

Either way we risk loosing something so I'm inclined to pick the high road. This may mean that we bear slightly increased risk to terrorist attacks, but at least I can proudly stand as a Canadian, a country that represents a higher, better standard in an evil world.

Remember, intelligence is gathered in many ways, so we won't be blind in the fight, but when we ignore our values and condone torture, we've already lost an important part of what it means to be Canadian and the terrorist has won without ever firing a shot or detonating a bomb.

....If Canada says that info obtained from torture is no longer declared unlawful and is now applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of each one of us to government. There is no longer any fundamental base for individual rights. Does man not have an inherent right to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty? Is that not written in stone in numerous "civilized "constitutions???? Does it not apply to all human beings????-- even those designated asunlawful enemy combatants....whatever that is??? If you make this one exception the whole value system crumbles....it means nothing...it is another nail in the coffin of moral uprightness which has served us well in the last century...not any more. We support the most cruel admins in the world..Saudi....even the Shah at one time who's cruelty was unbelievable...the list is endless....if torture works, why stop there? Why not bring it to domestic justice? schools....

We had individual rights long before the UN Convention on Torture, or Pierre Trudeau's little paper. But they aren't real. Never were.

Yes, those bigoted old white men in New England believed man was endowed with certain inherent rights by God--but who believes in that fairy tale anymore? Even then, those rights weren't the same ones you believe in. They, for instance, believed life could be taken away by individuals and by the state. They waged wars that would be considered horrific by our standards. They burned villages and held slaves. They did things we would consider to be torture.

Modern lefties point to things like the Charter or a UN declaration and say "that grants rights." But they're just pieces of paper. And if you believe that sovereignty and legitimacy comes from The People (as dear departed Jack Layton liked to say), what makes them so special? Can't we all just change them? Well, in fact, we do. All the time. We expand them (gays can get married!) and contract them (less freedom of speech!).

Sorry henry, but your cornerstone is a legal fiction. Always has been.

I did say assembled patiently and quietly over time. You can get them from Bombs R Us dissassembled though probably without batteries. Amercians, in fact, have been worred about such a scenario with dirty bombs, so I don't think it's completely beyond the realm of possibility. Besides it could be something as low tech as an airliner with a full load of fuel being crashed into one of Toronto's taller buildings. The things is: would you use information abtained by torture by some country other than Canada to stop such a massacre?

If all the above crypto-fascists would be willing to either perform the torture or at least be in the room lending a helping hand and moral support, then they might have the courage of their own convictions. Pretty scary. Unfortunately there are many who would happily jump in to save us all from the terrorists, and use whatever means necessary. Usually they are called sociopaths. In doing so, they become terrorists in their own right.
Did they not learn anything from the history of World War 2 or do they even know about it?
Thank you Dan Leger, and keep up the good work. We cannot ignore the Bullies of the world, no matter where we find them.

I'd be in the room when somebody got waterboarded if being in the room would help. If holding a wet towel over somebody's face would help, yep, I'd do that too.

Indeed I've studied World War II--including the rough treatment the Allies rightly meted out to captured enemy agents, along with the horrible atrocities committed on the civilian population by both sides. Been to a death camp. Tragic, and unforgettable. Also spent a lot of time in Dresden, also tragic on its own scale.

child hating, Liberal hating, brook no debate, freedom hating right-wingers have now embraced torture. Confessions extracted under torture have no validity, the victim will say anything to get it to stop. If Toews were tortured he'd probably say the our Dear Leader has taken over as the next leader of Al Quaida if they wanted him to.

The Banality of Evil

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
― Hannah Arendt

Commenting on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Israel, 1961

Is this comment hyperbolic? Perhaps. But from little acorns, big oaks grow; or the smaller the nut, the bigger the tree.

Another column by the looney left who is exaggerating what Toews said.

Canada does not engage in torture. Full stop.

However, if information comes to the Canadian government through its intelligence sources that something serious was going to happen in Canada and it may well be the information was obtained by another source via torture (to be defined) it would be irresponsible of the government to ignore it. This columnist would be the first to excoriate the government for not taking action.

Of course each situation is different but I have confidence that our intelligence people have the ability to separate the wheat from the chaf.

Once again to ignore information that is coming to hand no matter from what source would be a dereliction of duty on the part of the government.

Ronald Reagan once adopted an old Russian proverb. When it comes to any evidence, you may be inclined to believe it, but you verify it nonethless.

The left's slogan of 'information obtained from torture is always false!' is patently absurd. It seems to rely on an idea of torture as something out of the Spanish inquisition or Stalin-era show trial--confessions wrung out of victims for largely fictional crimes. In that sceario, the process is the punishment, and obtaining useful information is irrelevant. I know it may be shocking, but information obtained through any interrogation can also be false! Apparently, bad people have been known to lie. A skilled interrogator knows how to ask questions that lead to answers that can be easily verified. I suspect the same is true when the methods are more robust.

Hollern says "I have confidence that our intelligence people have the ability to separate the wheat from the chaf." Bob Sacomano "A skilled interrogator knows how to ask questions that lead to answers that can be easily verified."
....Well let's examine the facts... just recently documents found in Qaddafi’s External Security man Moussa Koussa’s office detail the rendition and torture of Abdul Hakim Belhaj and Abu Munthir. MI6, Britain’s external secret service, was deeply involved here because Abu Munthir had been arrested in Hong Kong, its old colonial nest. It is also via Tripoli that the decision was made to bring in Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi to a prison in Libya. Al-Libi, trainer for al-Qaeda, was captured in Pakistan in November 2001, questioned in Bagram by the FBI, turned over to the CIA, transported to a “black site” on the USS Bataan, rendered to Egypt, tortured, confessed about an al-Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection and spilled the false beans about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was al-Libi’s “confession” that Colin Powell fed to the world in his UN speech to promote the war on Iraq. When his work was done, al-Libi was turned over to the Libyans, and according to Lisa Hajjar, he was personally visited by Mubarak’s henchman Omar Suleiman in May 2009. As Suleiman boarded his plane in Tripoli, al-Libi conveniently committed suicide. False info resulted in the Iraq war ...>5000 western youth dead...for what...millions displaced in Iraq , hundreds of thousand of citizens dead..for what?..WMD that didn't exist, Al Quada ( now supporting the Syrian opposition with US help) not even present in Iraq....yep ..real good info.
Amazing the trust you have in your governments rather than law.

Canada does have a problem here, IF what Leger says is correct, that we signed an international agreement where we "forswears the use of information obtained by torture" But, as noted in the comments, if we come by info that indicates we have people in harm's way, then the government is absolutely obliged to act, and put Canada's interest above the said agreement.
My guess is there is a clause somewhere in the agreement that says exactly that sort of thing, if not then it is incumbent on this government to renegotiate or pull out, one or the other. No government can knowingly allow Canadians to be put at risk.

"That’s the perfect job for Toews, the minister of public safety who says it’s OK to torture."

"Toews insists that his government 'does not condone torture and certainly does not engage in torture.' That’s good, because the law says it’s not OK for Canadians to torture anyone in Canada or anywhere else."

This article is absolute rubbish and little more than a smear piece. Reading it was torture. Toews is doing his job and a pretty decent one at that.

Torture has existed since the dawn of humankind, and it always will. It is difficult if not impossible to accurately define what torture even is. Somewhere, right now, someone is being tortured. Possibly hundreds if not thousands of people. This is not news. The UN is a complete and total joke, as are the vast majority of the "conventions" and "resolutions" that it "adopts." Any person or agency, foreign or domestic, that provides information that might aid in preventing a serious threat to Canada and its citizenry deserves a medal... even if it was obtained through torture.

It still amasses me how much anger there is in people..People that believe that 9/11 gives us the right to do whatever it takes to get the Bogyman..9/11 was a false flag operation!!Wake up people!!Just check out the History of American False Flag Operations here.. http://911review.com/articles/anon/false_flag_perations.html
So info through torture can/will save lives..There were lots of info about the bogeyman before 9/11, Able Danger: http://abledangerblog.com/ The FBI stopped it dead in it's tracks..
What about abu ghraib, the prison in the Documentary; Standard Operating Procedures & also Check out Taxi to The Dark Side..Torture is just plain wrong period..........Backbencher

"We are seeing it again this week in light of a memo in which Public Safety Minister Vic Toews advises CSIS that in “exceptional circumstances,” ignoring intelligence simply because it might have been extracted by torture represents “an unacceptable risk to public safety.” The “protection of life and property,” he writes, must be CSIS’s “overriding priority.”

Most rational people would agree that all information should be considered and weighed before it is acted upon, especially if lives are at stake.
Obviously Leger has a different view or failed to comprehend the meaning of the words "might have been".

In the scenario suggested above - the one of the hydrogen bomb smuggled into Toronto - would it be morally justified to allow six million people to be murdered by not acting on knowledge of the impending nuclear explosion that you knew had been acquired through torture by a foreign agents? Some people here seem to think so.

Lets not get all Pollyanna on ourselves, remember the Somalia affair? Also, lets keep in mind our top secret JTF2 group, do you suppose those guys are immune to a little face slapping, thumb crushing and water boarding to get their answers? This ain’t Kansas anymore Dorothy and the world has changed dramatically, for me, if Syria or Israel wants to torture some dirt bag terrorist or “enemy combatant” for us and we get good intelligence from it, so be it. It sucks to be them.

Ah yes Selina - anyone who doesn't agree with you is automatically a "child hating, Liberal hating, brook no debate, freedom hating right-winger". Nice to see that you have such an open mind. Do us a favour please - until you are able to play with the big kids and treat others with a little respect, why don't you refrain from your vitriolic diatribes.

As for the issue at hand - would the "child loving, Liberal loving, open to debate, freedom loving left-wingers' prefer that the Canadian government ignore information passed to us from a foreign government whose policies may not be so clean as ours? Information that might save numerous Canadian lives? If that's how you feel then fine. Just don't complain if your loved ones are lost in a terrorist attack because Canadian security officials were handicapped by your naive idealism.

is an admission we have failed in information gathering. It's an easy way to gather information and the easiest and surest way to gather it falsely. Anyone torturing someone needs to remember the quote "There but for the grace of God go I". You never know when you will be gathered for a torturing if this is the road we are to take. Toews and the Harper party are shameful.